Trump tries to woo conservatives with bid to cut spending

The White House on Tuesday will send $15 billion in proposed spending cuts to Congress in an attempt to demonstrate fiscal austerity to skeptical conservatives, senior administration officials confirmed Monday night.

The administration had last week planned to send Congress a package of $11 billion in spending reductions. But since then, some conservatives have quietly pushed for an even bolder proposal, particularly after the GOP’s spending binge in recent months, said Republicans familiar with the discussions.

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The White House initially floated as much as $60 billion in cuts, including an unprecedented attempt to cancel money from this year’s omnibus spending bill. The proposal was later downsized to $11 billion, and then back up to $15 billion, targeting only unused funding from past years, which POLITICO first reported.

One senior administration official told reporters that the proposal coming Tuesday is “the largest single rescissions package at one time.”

The White House also plans to make a second attempt at clawing back funding from the omnibus, but the senior administration official said that could come weeks later.

The official said said President Donald Trump will be personally involved in the details of the next package, which will include “substantial” cuts in current spending based on the president’s own budget request.

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Unlike regular spending bills, a presidential rescissions package is given fast-track authority in both chambers. That means the proposal is one of the rare spending-related bills that is able to bypass the 60-vote threshold in the Senate.

Nearly half of the package, a whopping $7 billion, pulls from the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covers about 9 million low-income children.

Of this, $5 billion is fiscal 2017 funding that has already expired, and $2 billion is money from a so-called contingency fund that states can tap into if they’re short on cash.

These CHIP rollbacks “will not impact the program,” the senior administration official said.

It would also cut $800 millionfrom the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, which was created under Obamacare.

In addition, the proposal will target 38 programs with large amounts of leftover cash, including $148 million from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, $107 million for Hurricane Sandy in 2013 and $252 million for the Ebola outbreak in 2015.

The senior administration official said the White House is starting with “uncontroversial” cutbacks as a sweetener to bring Democrats on board.

“I don't think we believe there's a reason we wouldn’t get bipartisan support for a package like this,” the official said.

The process also includes a special bonus for fiscal hawks: Whenever the president submits a rescissions request, that spending is frozen automatically for 45 legislative days, or until Congress formally rejects it.

OMB Director Mick Mulvaney said in April that he hopes for a vote in the House before the July Fourth recess, and officials told reporters Monday that the House is “very interested in this package.”

The GOP-dominated House is expected to easily clear the rescissions package, but even White House officials are less confident about its fate in the Senate, White House legislative affairs director Marc Short told POLITICO on Monday. Trump is pleased with the $15 billion proposal, Short said.

In a call with Capitol Hill staff on Monday, White House officials skirted a question about whether Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had signed off on the proposal.

“We are in discussions with the majority leader,” the administration official said on the call, which POLITICO was permitted to listen to by a staffer. “We’re hopeful the Senate’s going to come our way but I would say it’s an ongoing conversation right now.”

Trump’s unusually large request would come after a nearly two-decade drought of any formal rescissions proposal.

Former President Bill Clinton was the last president to propose rescissions. His three requests totaled just $128 million, a fraction of Trump’s request.

Even with Trump’s record-setting sum, conservative groups are demanding the Trump administration go further by proposing to cancel funds from the omnibus, which Trump threatened to veto.

Americans for Prosperity, the right-leaning group founded by the Koch brothers, is asking the White House to reel back $45 billion from the $1.3 trillion omnibus.

The group on Monday released an exhaustive list of programs it believes should go on the chopping block, including homeless assistance grants, a Coast Guard security center, FBI salaries and the National Cancer Institute.

Behind the scenes, top budget officials have wrestled for weeks with Republican lawmakers on the size and scope of the rescissions package.

The debate was largely centered on whether to cut money across the board from the omnibus spending package, or whether to target individual programs.

Few Republicans wanted the across-the-board cuts as those would have hit the hard-won increases to military spending. But officials also worried that going after specific programs would spur infighting among Republicans, according to one former top GOP congressional aide briefed on the deliberations — an outcome everyone hoped to avoid ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

Meanwhile, belt-tightening conservatives in the House are still hoping for more than $15 billion in cuts.

An internal survey of dozens of House Republican Study Committee members found that lawmakers overwhelmingly support the largest possible rescissions request. The survey, which was obtained by POLITICO, found that 71 percent of RSC members said they would back a proposal that cut at least $60 billion. Another 9 percent said they'd support any amount.

And 94 percent of RSC members surveyed said the rescissions package should cut at least some domestic funding from this year's $1.3 trillion omnibus. Only 6 percent said "maybe."

Republican budget wonks also wondered if the final package would accomplish the task of reducing government spending in a meaningful way, if it indeed took previously unspent money from old programs.

“This is not a deficit reduction exercise, but more of a public relations exercise to soothe the base and convince them that the White House is fiscally responsible,” said G. William Hoagland, a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former director of budget and appropriations for former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist as well as the former director of the Senate Budget Committee.

“If they are finding unused budget authority and putting that in a special package to Congress as appropriators are trying to put together the [fiscal] 2019 bill, it may have the effect of creating more spending for 2019 rather than less,” Hoagland said.

Nancy Cook, John Bresnahan and Matthew Nussbaum contributed to this report